In February 2009, Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder announced the administration wanted to make “a few gun-related changes” including a ban on “assault weapons.”

This year began with great promise for the Brady Campaign. After Gabrielle Giffords was shot, Brady President Paul Helmke announced:

[W]e can and should do more … to address the easy access to high-powered guns that make it too easy for dangerous and irresponsible people to disrupt and destroy the lives of innocent Americans.

Implying the Brady campaign was pleased by the Giffords shooting is of course incorrect, but after the fact, gun-control proponents have exploited shootings of public officials for their cause. For example, the Brady Campaign is named after Jim Brady, President Reagan’s press secretary who was shot during an assassination attempt. The Brady Campaign had reason to hope history would repeat itself — but Congress didn’t respond.

Instead, Brady leaders had to rely on Obama’s promise during a private meeting that he was working on gun control “under the radar.” Not long after, the Fast and Furious scandal blew up in the administration’s face.

Nevertheless, last June, Brady Vice President Dennis Henigan misrepresented ATF data by declaring that 70% of all Mexican cartel guns came from U.S. gun stores. He did not mention that that most came from ATF, FBI, and DEA smuggling, U.S. State Department sales to Central American countries, and the black market.

While Congress deposed him regarding Fast and Furious, Holder accused congressional investigators of revenge and racism. Yet Brady’s own data prove this statement an example of Brady’s hypocrisy and lack of credibility. States with the most gun control have the lowest levels of gun ownership. They also experience the highest black homicide and lowest Caucasian homicide rates.

In 2007, Brady began publishing an annual scorecard grading states’ gun control laws on a 100 point scale, then assigning “stars” to states: four stars was Brady’s best (most gun control), no stars their worst, with the assumption that Brady’s “best” states were the safest. State grades were then collated with the latest available (2008) homicide data from the Centers for Disease Control. The graph below shows that while Brady’s “best” states were safest for Caucasians, they were the deadliest for blacks (the black homicide rate scale is on the left, the Caucasian scale is on the right):

This is important, because American gun control is rooted in racism — it was originally designed to protect white European immigrants from Native Americans. After the Revolution, gun control protected white Americans from black slaves and freemen, and then helped our government imprison Japanese Americans in World War II.

Worse for Brady, their “safest” states had the highest black firearms homicide rates, but the lowest Caucasian rates:

(Spearman’s coefficient for 2007 is 0.30; for 2008 it is 0.10. Less gun control weakly correlated with lower firearms homicide rates.)

More bad news for Brady: Collating their scorecards with FBI violent crime shows that right-to-carry (RTC) states — where law-abiding citizens have broader rights to carry a concealed handgun — are becoming safer over time, compared to Brady’s “safest” states, which don’t give citizens such rights. (The graph below displays states’ average violent crime rates by RTC status, with the percentage difference in green.) As of 2010, RTC states were 35.0% safer than non-RTC states, and had a 41.9% lower murder rate, too:

Brady gave RTC states an average scorecard value of 9.0 in 2010, while non-RTC states averaged 51.3. According to Brady, non-RTC states are safer because they enforce more gun control laws such as firearm registration, waiting periods of up to 10 days before you can pick up the gun you already bought, and bans on magazines containing over 10 rounds of ammunition. In Brady’s imaginary world, the above violent crime values would be reversed.

Unfortunately, the “Firearms are liberty teeth” quote is bogus. The terminology doesn’t remotely match that of the time. Guncite, and I think JPFO, have a long list of debunked phrases. It’s important not to use false quotes, because they can be hurled back at you.

“Never trust the veracity of anything you read on the internet. That’s how World War I started.” — Abraham Lincoln.

the internet exists as a flow of electrons which travel at the speed of light. this means it exists at no point and every point in spacetime. so long as the internet exists at any time, it exists at every time.

Except that as everyone knows who has suffered internet lag, network timeouts, and just plain old slow connection speed, the speed of light is not a constant when injected into the equation.

Seriously, though, I used to think electrons moved at the speed of light, too. I was surprised to learn the electrons don’t really move much at all. They are the medium through which electrical energy moves. Much like sound through air, or waves through the sea, the air and the water don’t move far from their original position. It’s the energy that propagates through it. The speed of it’s movement is entirely dependent upon the environmental conditions of the medium (temperature, sources of interference, resistance, capacitance, inductance, etc…)

This is old news, but most people don’t realize it as Ike Eisenhower deleted it from his speech warning the American people about the power of the “military industrial congressional complex”

Public education in America has been in serious trouble for decades and now a new problem has arisen: racial discrimination against black kids by teachers, administrators, and entire districts.

At least that’s the conclusion drawn by some African-American educators, the mainstream media, and the Obama adminstration.

Our schools have long been plagued by declining test scores, graduates who can’t read or cipher, high dropout rates, violence, cheating and sex scandals, and little to nothing has been done to substantively address those issues.

Instead, attention has lately been focused on the scourge of bullying–which has existed for as long as there have been kids–and on the “phenomenon” of unruly and disruptive cherubs being disciplined for being black.

Wisely, the MSM generally doesn’t directly attribute that “phenomenon” to racism since there is no racist intent in disciplining students. The MSM merely implies there is.

In a WaPo article titled, “In Washington Area, African American Students Suspended and Expelled Two to Five Times as Often as Whites,” racism is never cited as the cause behind those figures. WaPo’s Donna St. George simply writes that they create “disparities in discipline that experts say reflect a growing national problem.”

St. George points to one expert, Montgomery County Deputy Superintendent Frieda K. Lacey, who said her district “has trained principals and administrators in new approaches, which include involving a team of administrators in suspension decisions.”

Translation: Lacey and company will intercede on a black student’s behalf after he or she creates mayhem in a school.

Lacey also noted that ”Nearly 6 percent of black students were suspended or expelled from school last year,” comparing that percentage with the 1.2 percent of white students.

Just in case St. George’s readers missed the racial import of Lacey’s comparison, a clarification is provided: Lacey “pointed to one unsettling statistic: 71 percent of suspensions for insubordination . . . were handed out to black students. African Americans make up 21 percent of students in Montgomery’s schools.”

Translation: Black kids are being discriminated against en masse with expulsions, suspensions, and other disciplinary measures because they are black and not because they tend to be unruly and incapable of being disciplined short of getting rid of them.

WaPo’s African-American adjunct, The Root, takes a more straightforward approach to the issue.

Maybe it has nothing to do with how teachers and administrators see black kids. Maybe it has everything to do with how each child behaves, and the consequences of his or her behavior. It would be interesting to see a study conducted in the same area cited by the Washington Post that looks at the number of white kids who come from homes where there is no father present, compared to the number of black kids in the same circumstance. I suspect there would be a strong correlation. But then I suppose even suggesting such a study would be deemed raaaaaaacist. Unless of course it was conducted under the guise of getting more federal funding for those already failing government schools.

“For 2012, the most important criteria in determining a candidate’s legitimacy: how comfortable is the candidate with the concept of armed citizens?”

That has always been my criteria for any election. It is an excellent litmus test as it tells what a candidates notion of the state/citizen relationship is. It tells us who the candidate thinks should be ‘in charge’.

Right on, Briggsy. Let’s assume that you have a grown daughter that lives alone. You might suggest to her that it would be a good idea if she were to take NRA training and learn to use a handgun safely and responsibly and after doing so then suggest that she keep a handgun in her home for her own personal protection. Later an intruder breaks in to your daughter’s home but he is met by your armed and trained daughter and his intentions (rape, murder, robbery?) are stopped. But not in your world, Briggsy. Your daughter has listened to your wisdom which is “access to guns and ammo is a menace to society”. So as you stand next to her casket at the funeral home you can tell the grieving visitors that “we brought up our daughter to never be a menace to society”. To quote you…”grow up!”.

Briggsy: The old saying: “God made Men; Sam Colt made them equal”. Women benefit differentially by firearm possession–they are physically smaller and weaker than men. Read John Lott’s work.

Particularly interesting is the effect of the “waiting periods” on violence against women; when ex boyfriend goes nuts and the woman has to wait ten days to get her “equalizer”; he has ten days free and clear.

Why in the world would a boyfriend have to “shoot” his estranged girlfriend if she was totally defenseless? A ball bat, axe, bare hands, kitchen knife, length of rope, pillow over the face, etc. could do the job equally well. Your logic is absurd.

I’m at a loss as to how you somehow conclude that an ordinary person in the presence of a gun will miracuously turn into a deranged slaughtering butcher, unable to control themself due to that undue influence of the inanimate object, yet this same person will instantly revert to normal if only the presence of the weapon is removed.

I guess this mennace (and Warmongering) plays itself out in the Low Murder rate of 69 per 100,000 in the Gun Control Capital of the world Washington D.C. while the Outrageous rate of 8.9 per 100,000 in Neighboring Virginia is caused by their very lack of Gun Control.

Your full circle of Pretzil Logic must make its presense in the anals of stupidity when you realize your arguments amount to “We MUST get rid of the Mennace of Guns because at any time some deranged lunatic could pull one out and go on a shooting spree, but anyone who wants to own thier own gun to protect themselves from such a lunatic is clearly paranoid and should not be permitted to buy one.” (see the girl and ex-boyfriend scenerios for details)

Excellent. I agree. Government should immediately give up all guns as a good example and show of good will, no way should cops be armed, what a bad example for the children, government first please. Hmm. I don’t think the Secret Service will agree with you, or the FBI or the CIA or the military or the DEA or the ATF, Oh wait the ATF might, Officer Terry was was unarmed when he was murdered by a FBI-informant led rip crew armed with ATF’s Fast and Furious guns, Thanks fellas. On the bright side, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro and the Mexican drug cartel’s would.

Bugsy, you sound paranoid. This preoccupation on going to war may be a sign of your innate violent tendencies that you project on gun owners, placing some sort of magical influence on an inanimate object.

The technology of warfare was fairly equivalent for both sides during the Revolutionary War. If the Crown had possessed drones, the story would have turned out quite differently. For today’s “patriot” to stand a chance, he would need weaponry which cannot realistically be produced in a home workshop.

So let’s drop the pretense of a free society somehow requiring access to guns and ammo. This is a lie which simply perpetuates violence being committed by the population against itself.

Actually, Briggsy, I suspect that you already know how we’d win that war.

That’s why you rant so vehemently about “you can’t possibly win, so give me all your guns, and I’ll let you live…for a certain value of ‘live’”. The dachas, the underaged prostitutes, the exppensive liquors, the riding in limos with smoked-glass windows whilst the peasantry tugs their forelocks…you wake up sweating, knowing all the things you thugs crave so much could suddenly be taken away from you.

No Bugsy, you haven’t addressed my point. So far, your dataset is 50% true. If anything, your mentioning technology makes this more true. If your life is worth no more than a coin toss, then I feel sorry for you. The rest of your mumbling is just graffiti. Fix yourself inside first, before claiming to have some knowledge that you need to share.

Bugsy, you are what normal people refer to as an “idiot”. To back up your already-dubious claims, you quote a story on gun violence occurring in one of the cities with the most restrictive gun laws in the country, without seeing the irony? Do you seriously not see the disconnect here?

Please don’t vote or breed. You aren’t smart enough to do either successfully.

I do not know why people actually respond to insignificant little monkeys like yourself, you just cannot understand you are in the minority here, that we as a Free Nation have GOD given rights and the right to bear arms is one of them. So as the trend continues towards strengthening the 2nd amendment and the farce from the left to remove it is ending. Just move along and live with it, be happy you live in the greatest country in the world.

The pretend “right” of access to guns and ammo empowers miscreants to take away all the genuine rights of their victims. You might not be so pro gun if a bullet pierced your flesh and bone. Such a misfortune might well give you pause to ponder the repercussions of the lunacy you advocate.

I am so pro-gun my mother 5’1″ 100lb was saved from a 6’2″ 300+ lb burglar who after we saw a mug shot review from our family friend in the sheriff department, had a long violent history against women. Where were the police when she needed them einstein? Not to mention several other times where wayward youth thought I looked like an easy target, encircling me at the boat ramp, mall, and a stroll in the park to cutoff my escape. Funny how a smile and sliding my coat away from my side painted an entirely different picture. They suddenly didnt want to attack a person who was packing heat for some reason while they held only ball bats, clubs and tire irons. FYI didnt have to shoot a single one of those misguided people, and not a single incident was worth reporting to the police as since no physical attack occurred, what would they be charged with?

Funny how the US government acknowledges that 70% of all violent crimes are never reported USDOJ National Victimization report 2008 4.8 mil not reported.

Funny how the government & police acknowledge that only 15% of the time are shots fired in a violent crime or incident where a firearm was unholstered. DOJ Firearms use by Offenders Nov 2001

Funny how the government acknowledges that in only 15% of the time shots are fired are the intended targets hit. (see multiple policde firearm discharge reports)

Oh thats right, einstein wants everyone to believe criminals are perfect and never miss and are better shots than the police, uh yeah right.

Since for example in 2008 there were 12,252 murders involving a firearm and over 70,000 injuries.

But per the FBI UCR there were only 381,000 violent crimes reported involving a firearm which when referencing the DOJ Firearms use by Offenders Nov 2001 & those police firearm discharge reports, there should have only been around 8,570 deaths and injuries total based on 15% of time shots fired and 15% of the time targets hit.

Since there were actually 82,252 total deaths and injuries, we understand how the government recognizes all those incidents where no shots were fired do not get reported, why dont you einstein? Drugs, insanity, do tell!

Wow, such things are so rare, why did all these successful defensive gun uses and such occur?

Keep & Bear Arms
KC3
Armed Citizen’American Rifleman

Four of many websites that collate actual successful defensive incidents on average of 80 per month.

Any claims of bias means the village knows where to find their lost idiot.

Bugsy, what have you been smoking? When you actually have something to contribute beyond empty Brady rhetoric and fantasy straw dummies, please return.

“You might not be so pro gun if a bullet pierced your flesh and bone.”

So…all those wounded military folks who are pro-gun are what in your book? You know, the ones who risked their lives so you can sit at a computer and disseminate graffiti?

The only lunacy here is your delusional rants that have nothing to do with reality, but everything to do with defending a corrupt, racist organization that is losing credibility because every time they publish a report it turns out they’re lying.

From Pjmedia:
“This year began with great promise for the Brady Campaign. After Gabrielle Giffords was shot, Brady President Paul Helmke announced:

[W]e can and should do more … to address the easy access to high-powered guns that make it too easy for dangerous and irresponsible people to disrupt and destroy the lives of innocent Americans.” Cont… “Implying the Brady campaign was pleased by the Giffords shooting is of course incorrect, but after the fact, gun-control proponents have exploited shootings of public officials for their cause.”

The fact is, Helmke said MUCH more than that from Gabby’s shooting.
Paul Helmke’s “DREAM” has been a reality for him to try an justify more gun-grabbing. His “dream” has been created by Gabby’s tragic shooting.

“My dream would be she recovers well enough to get back to the House, and maybe walking with friends on the side gets down to the well of the House, turns around and thanks everyone to applause and says, ‘Why haven’t you done anything about gun violence in this country?’ That alone would transform this debate.

“That’s painting a movie scenario, but I think that is something that could happen.”

“Tyrants from Hitler to Mao to Stalin have sought to disarm their own citizens, for the simple reason that unarmed people are easier to control. Our Founders, having just expelled the British army, knew that the right to bear arms serves as the guardian of every other right.”
- RON PAUL

A candidate’s voting record on guns, or stand if he has no voting record, tells me whether he’s a friend of liberty or a foe. Would-be tyrants hate an armed populace. I’m pleased to see that even the blandly renamed Brady Campaign (they used to be Handgun Control Inc) has statistics that show it ought to disband.

It isn’t Ron Paul’s position on guns that disqualifies him from being a serious candidate for president. It’s his national security/foreign policy stand that disqualifies him. Guns are the first litmus test, but not the only one.

What this country needs is more arms in the closet, particularly 12 gage and AR variants. Hey, since Big Gov can force us to buy health care, it can force us to buy arms! For the first time in my life, I see some reason to support government mandates.

Can you confidently state the connection between the Irish and politics is entirely cultural? Can you confidently state the connection between orientals and Jews and academic achievement is entirely cultural? Can you confidently state the connection between Jews and the award of Nobel prizes is entirely cultural? Can you confidently state the connection between being female and creating children is entirely cultural? Can you confidently state that the connection between Blacks and basketball/football/100-yard-dash performance is entirely cultural? Can you confidently state that the reason 97% of all pilots are male is entirely cultural? Can you confidently state that the reason why all geniuses are male is entirely cultural. Can you confidently state the reason that the top 120 composers of music (from the Renaissance to the present) are male is entirely cultural? Can you confidently state that the reason the top 100 sculptors, painters, and dramatists are male is entirely cultural? Can you confidently state that the reason for the different shapes of the male and female IQ distributions, and different IQ averages for males and females, is entirely cultural? I could go on and on.

It is true that “politically correct” egalitarianism requires that there be no genetic component to anything. But the presence of that requirement does not prove there is no interaction between genetics and culture.

There is a lot of science proving there are substantial genetic determinants to cultural variables, Mike.

Bulldoodle, Wil Schuemann. No such “scientific proof” exists, as all it takes is one “oriental” who can’t do math, one female pilot, one apolitical Irishman or half a Briton who can cook to disprove it.

You’re a frikkin’ racist/sexist. Maybe that’s genetic? Own up to it and stop trying to hide behind “science” like a cat trying to cover up a fresh turd on a bare tile floor.

Mike;
Useful informations awaits you under the 10th comment addressed to Roberta X, relative to the article appearing 30 December 2011 on pjmedia.com/blog/a-tough-year-for-gun-controls-brady-campaign/
Kate, female of coulour

Brady works around the same concept of the 55. When states were freed from the Federal Government’s unconstitutional freeway speed laws, detractors screamed that the roads would run red with blood (the same language used by any anti-gun politicians incidentally). Instead, just the opposite happened, and the red asphalt crowd quickly lost credibility.

The same is going for guns. States are rethinking their outlook on firearms. State after state is being more lenient about concealed carry, and the prognostication of ‘Western’ street shoot outs has rung as hollow as Anthropogenic Global Warming. This is bad news for the Brady campaign who long ago abandoned their original intent in favor of being the official propaganda arm of the anti-firearm left.

If I were a betting man, and I’m not, I’d wager many of these firearm prohibitionists are all for legalized drugs, citing the failure of prohibition to curb behavior.

but back in the 1960s, liberal criminologists even advocated disarming the American police, like the bobbies in London. The theory was that an armed and violent police causes an armed and violent criminal element.

Liberals have never apologized for turning America’s greatest cities into crime-ridden, drug-ridden, graffiti-ridden, welfare-ridden, gang-ridden pestholes. But those of us who are old enough, remember how and when they caused that.

Mand has been getting high in some fashion since they first walked this earth.

We see how ineffective prohibition was in the 1930′s.

There is no substantative medical study anywhere in the wrold where legalization of drugs has resulted in an increase of addiction rates.

So why should legalization of illicit drugs not have the same effect as repeal of prohibition had and reducing the power of the Mafia?

We could drastically reduce the $200 billion a year spent on interdiction efforts that still allow over $45 billion in illiciti drugs across our border with Mexico each year.

We could reduce the manpower assigned to all those DEA effrots and reallocate them to border control.

We could reduce our over 2.7 million in prison by 40% and quit educating that many more people in advanced criminal activities with such incarcerations. How many hundred of millions would that save a year to the public who foots the bill for this?

California $129.04 a day to house an inmate = $47,099.60 a year to tax payers per prisoner.

2.7 mil prisoners reduced by 40% = 1.08 mil not in prison if illicit drugs legalized x $47,099.60 = over $5 billion a year saved to taxpayers alone or somewhere close to that vicinty.

But no, those fifedoms of power in the FBI, DEA, and companies that own the prisons have no logical reason to actually legalize illicit drugs as that would eliminate their resource of criminals that justify their existence eh?

These are just the obvious talking and possible cost reduction points to begin with, more exist.

So who again cant see what effect legalization of illicit drugs would have?

2011 already was with ammunition shortages as well as gun and magazine shortages, today I went to the range and had to put my name on a waiting list, which I have never had to do, also lately 9mm or really any ammunition is flying off the shelves at Walmart, so I am now buying in bulk to make sure I have my supply for the range and self defense.

The good part is that when you can get it ammunition is going down in cost since it seems that manufacturers are putting out more for the increased demand!

People like to talk about gun ownership, and how in the hands of the law-abiding, more guns reduce deaths in low-trust areas compared to similar regions where the populace has less ability to defend self and others. What’s not as often discussed is that gun ownership significantly reduces violent crime (a number of current examples of this – e.g. the rate of home invasions in Australia went up an order of magnitude after most guns were collected as a reaction to the Port Arthur massacre – at a net greater cost in innocent lives and peace-of-mind than the massacre itself) – where (sadly) violent crime and intrusions into personal space previously thought to be safe has a much greater cost on society than murder. Because fear can, and often does, enslave, especially the weak, the female, and the old. And this diminishment of the person is reflected in all their relationships and endeavors – because the violence impacts the victim and other they interact with far longer than the mourning and grieving for a lost loved one.

We should have a disciplined measure of civil-society that is hard to game (I’m afraid most law enforcement metrics and self-reporting isn’t appropriate – metrics and measurments need be established and made by independent parties.. hmmm.. should apply to the AGW argument as well – given we have no reluctance to require this of the private sector in areas that impact health and safety – like double-blind testing for drug approval). And that gun ownership (even without ammunition) should be encouraged by public safety organizations at a rate inversely proportional to the measured (rate of change of in) civil society. So that in the worst neighborhoods (esp. neighborhoods in decline going from good to bad) I’d expect to see the police going door-to-door and offering weapons and training (and v.v. – offering to pick them up once things had improved to the point that homes and cars could be left unlocked – or whatever the metric is that people agree is “civil” enough society).

Granted, in today’s guild-ed (unionized) environment I’m afraid this would be seen in the worst areas as a threat to those organizations – Union leadership would like us to think just hiring more officers (and/or guards) is the best approach – vice (what I suspect the majority of the Union’s members would favor) a return to America’s tradition of individual responsibility, with self-policing and largely self-protecting neighborhoods and families.

There is only one reason governments push to disarm their citizens, and it has nothing to do with crime. It’s all about control. An unarmed population is far easier to control (abuse?) than one which is legally armed. This is why our Founding Fathers felt so strongly about the Second Amendment. It’s no accident they placed it right after the most important Amendment we have as a so-called free people.

I used to debate gun control on talk.politics.guns in the 90s, but now . . . who cares what gun control trolls think?

They have lost the fight on almost every level. The Supremes have reconized the 2nd as an individual right that applies to handguns. They even incorporated the 2nd. We have eased carry laws in the majority of states with excellent results. People oppose gun restrictuins, even on so called “assault weapons”.

People are buying guns and ammo in huge quantities. The “black rifle” the AR, is very popoular and accepted by the public.

Handgun control heaven that the UK is, has proven the failure of gun control with record gun crime rates that came about after total bans on handguns.

The Democrats made no effort to move gun control back in 2009-2010 when they had full control, even when they had 60% of the Senate and with a radical anti-gun leftist as POTUS.

One point about guns and freedom I would like to bring up is this: I think that the RIGHT to own guns has a significant impact on freedom, aside from their actual use resisting tyranny, etc.

An armed population accepts responsibility for its own defense, and is intrinsically more moral in my view than an unarmed population that is fully dependent upon the government. Dependence destroys freedom, and the right to keep and bear arms is a powerful right that has implication that go beyond the martial potential of the weapons, but helps maintain the moral behaviour of the people.